3 Free Fast Traffic Methods That Work (And 3 That Do Not)

In this post I’d like to share with you 3 totally free traffic methods that work very effectively to drive fast traffic to your blog or website.

In the hope that you can learn from my mistakes, I shall also mention 3 strategies that don’t work and strongly advise you to steer clear of them!

Ok, let’s get started…

Free And Fast Traffic Methods That Work

1. Link Roundup Posts

A link roundup is a post on your blog which contains several links to other blogs. This can be a very fruitful traffic strategy because when you publish your post the bloggers that you have linked are automatically notified by a WordPress “Trackback”.

When the other bloggers see that you have linked to them (in their WordPress Admin dashboards), there is not only a great chance that they will visit your site to see what you have said about them but also that they will link back to you from their site.

One of the best tactics to use is to write a link roundup post which details 10 bloggers in your niche that you really like. When the other bloggers see this they will almost be compelled to let their own readers know that they have been identified in your top 10 list. This can produce awesome results in terms of a link back to your site together with a flood of traffic!

2. Guest Posts

I know, I know, everyone knows about guest posts, right? But can you honestly say that you have used this tactic to its fullest potential?

A great way to find guest post opportunities in your niche is to search in Google with the phrase “write for us”. For example, if your niche is within the weight loss market then start by trying this search:

weight loss “write for us”

I’ve personally found that guest posts deliver heaps of traffic from people clicking on the link back to your site. Not only this, but you also gain an SEO boost from the link itself. And all for one article which might take you an hour or two to write. Massive leverage in this strategy!

3. Video Marketing

Again, this is something that most of us have heard of but are probably not exploiting to its fullest potential.

Instead of just posting videos onto YouTube, try these tips:

Find a similar video to yours which is very popular and has a high number of views and comments. Next, copy the tags from this video into yours. This will give you a great chance that your video will appear in the “Suggestions” list on the right hand side when the more popular video is playing.

Find a popular video and post a video response to it. You can do this by clicking on “Create a video response” next to the comments box below the video. Hardly anyone does this so it can be an incredible traffic strategy for just a few minutes work.

At the risk of stating the obvious, make sure that you place a link back to your website in the first line of the description. This is so viewers can see (and hopefully) click on your link without having to expand the description field using the “Show more” button.

I’ve found it very effective to point the link back to my squeeze page which allows me to build my email subscriber list from the traffic generated by YouTube.

Ok, now for some traffic methods that don’t work, or more specifically, don’t work effectively in my experience…

Traffic Methods That Don’t Work

Link Exchanges

Up until around 3 years ago, these worked very well. You link to me and I’ll link to you and we both get an SEO boost from Google, right? Unfortunately, Google decided that this practice was against its terms and conditions which means that at best link exchanges no longer work and at worst you’ll land yourself with a penalty.

Stay away!

Safelists

The idea here is that you get to email other members of a Safelist community and promote your website/blog/squeeze page/product in return for agreeing to receive emails from other members who are promoting their stuff.

Once upon a time this probably was an effective method of traffic generation, however, the problem now is that everyone simply opens their emails and clicks on the link labeled “click here to gain credits” (or something similar). In other words, people just want to get their credits so that they can send out more of their own emails to you! 99.9% of the time they have no interest in actually visiting your site.

Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges are similar to Safelists except that instead of emailing other members you agree to view their websites in return for them viewing yours. In my experience this can generate traffic, but its traffic really not worth having as the visitors simply wish to gain their credits by viewing website after website without paying any attention to the content.

So there you have it 3 totally free traffic strategies that work very effectively (and with rather minimal effort!) and 3 strategies to avoid.

Now, take action and get guest posting, video marketing and writing that link roundup post!

Rob Cornish runs Gain Higher Ground which is a blog about how to start and grow your online business and other aspects of internet marketing. Rob is also an active marketer in the online stock trading niche.

I recently tried video marketing and guess what? It worked massively for me bringing in huge targeted traffic. Guest post is another new system that works for everyone. I strongly believe the potential of guest blogging is still untapped. Thanks for sharing on traffic generation tips.

I understand that social and video marketing are dominating right now but I’ve never really learned how to do either. From reading this post, I take it that future traffic strategies will have some sort of community involvement around it.

Hi Rob,
I haven’t thought of doing link roundup posts or video marketing on my blog yet. I will have to make note of that. I agree with you that doing guest posts is a fun and great way to get traffic. About the traffic methods that don’t work, I only knew about the first one, link exchanges. The second and third ones are quite new to me. Glad to know about what safelists are as well as traffic exchanges.
Thanks for sharing!

@Rob, you can also target facebook, twitter, review sites, images sharing platform like flicker and you can also target wikki sites like wikkepedia.org, wikkimedia.org. Thanks for the great tips you shared, happy blogging.

It’s absolutely true. Link exchanges and safe lists are just a total waste of time. As a blogger, I waste a lot of time on both until I realized I was heading nowhere. Today, my major source of targeted traffic is guest post. It’s so powerful that I intend giving it my entire time. Thanks for sharing and guiding all of us.